Google reveals 10 new search algorithm changes

Search giant Google has provided an insight into 10 changes it has made out of the 500 changes it makes in a typical year to its search algorithm.

“Our goal is to make search run so smoothly, you don’t even notice the changes,” said Google’s distinguished engineer Matt Cutts.

“These changes improve everything from translation, to snippets to autocomplete,” he said on Google’s official blog.

The algorithm changes, which were made in recent weeks, are as follows:

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), Google will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.

Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: "This change helps Google choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu."

Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: "Google looks at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content."

Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: "This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English."

Extending application rich snippets: "We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often."

Retiring a signal in Image search: "As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web."

Fresher, more recent results: "As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35pc of total searches (around 6-10pc of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query."

Refining official page detection: "We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking."

Improvements to date-restricted queries: "We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify."

Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Before you go messing with your server

“If you’re a site owner, before you go wild tuning your anchor text or thinking about your web presence for Icelandic users, please remember that this is only a sampling of the hundreds of changes we make to our search algorithms in a given year, and even these changes may not work precisely as you’d imagine,” Cutts said.

“We’ve decided to publish these descriptions in part because these specific changes are less susceptible to gaming,” Cutts said.